But while thus far, the evidence of language is, at best, vague and indefinite in its response to the inquiry for proofs of relationship of the races of America to those of the Old World; physiological comparisons lend no confirmation to the idea of an indigenous native race, with special affinities and adaptation to its peculiar environment, and with languages all of one class, the ramifications from a single native stem. So far as physical affinities can be relied upon, the man of America, in all his most characteristic racial diversities, is of Asiatic origin. His near approximation to the Asiatic Mongol is so manifest as to have led observers of widely different opinions in all other respects, to concur in classing both under the same great division: the Mongolian of Pickering, the American Mongolidæ of Latham, the Mongoloid of Huxley. Professor Flower, in an able discussion of the varieties of the human species, addressed to the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain in 1885, unhesitatingly classes the Eskimo as the typical North Asiatic Mongol. In other American races he notes as distinctive features the characteristic form of the nasal bones, the well-developed superciliary ridge, and retreating forehead; but the resemblance is so obvious in many other respects, that he finally includes them all among the members of the Mongolian type. If, then, the American Mongol came originally from Asia, or sprung from the common stock of which the Asiatic Mongol is the typical representative, within any such period as even earliest Phœnician history would embrace, much more definite traces of affinity are to be looked for in his language than mere correspondence in the agglutination characteristic of a very widely diffused class of speech. But we, thus far, look in vain for traces of a common genealogy such as those which, on the one hand, correlate the Semitic and Aryan families of Asia and Europe with parent stocks of times anterior to history, and on the other, with ramifications of modern centuries. We have, moreover, to deal mainly with the languages of uncivilised races. To the continent north of the Gulf of Mexico, the grand civilising art of the metallurgist remained to the last unknown; and in Mexico, it appears as a gift of recent origin, derived from Central America. The Asiatic origin of the art of Tubal-cain has, indeed, been pretty generally assumed, both for Central and Southern America; but by mere inference. In doing so, we are carried back to some mythic Quetzalcoatl: for neither the metallurgist nor his art was introduced in recent centuries. Assuming, for the sake of argument, the dispersion of a common population of Asia and America, already familiar with the working of metals, and with architecture, sculpture and other kindred arts, at a date coeval with the founding of Tyre, “the daughter of Sidon,” what help does language give us in favour of such a postulate? We have great language groups, such as the